mercredi 31 décembre 2008

Sailboat Tara is in Paris (on the Petit Palais' bank) until january 11st. This boat has been doing a lot of expedition around the world (for example in 2005, French artist Pierre Huyghe and some friends of his went to Antartica doing some research) and now exhibit its last journey in Artica.

Tara was built in 1989 after having beeing designed by Luc Bouvet et Olivier Petit, architects for Jean-Louis Etienne, a client passionnate in Antartica. Principle was to create a solid boat able to slip - with rudders and fins obviouly removed - on icefield in order to stay on it just in the same way that norvegian navigator Fridtjof Nansen did with his boat, Fram in the XIXth century.

This last exhibition last one year and half between 2006 and 2008 and consisted in a drift on the north pole's ice field while scientific research were achieved.

That is how ends our thematic about SMALL. We're a bit sorry not to have found a real coherency with it, but what we can extract from this, would probably be that SMALL is definetely a human scale which can possibly be built by a small group of people trying to express their creativity. Size, economy, technicity, involvement are issues which can, most of the time, be proceed by a small amount of persons and therefore can make a lot of projects happenning. SMALL in public space can thus, be a sum of discreet participation of people to the democratic construction.

mardi 30 décembre 2008

Luz intima is a guerrilla intervention in la calle del Pez in Madrid where the collective, Luzinterruptus installed twenty six domestic shades on urban lights. This operation lasted for one night. It is a quite discreet appropriation of public space which I hope would give some motivation for other people to act on commun space.

lundi 29 décembre 2008

Local river is the last published project of paris based office Matthieu Lehanneur (with Anthony van den Bossche), which proposes a "locavore" (people who only eat food produced in a radius of 100 miles of them) tool of producing local fish food and vegetables with an absolute control of its owner. Beyond the beautiful design, I do suspect it to be full of irony (at least I hope), by giving such a litteral and luxurious proposition.It was exhibited this year in Artists Space in New York.

vendredi 26 décembre 2008

Wired.com currently presents an interesting article about Netherlands' plan for saving the country from huge future floods there. More than fighting these floods, this plan tries the best as possible of coping with water by flooding some areas preventing some others (like cities) from them.

mardi 23 décembre 2008

This installation by LAVA (LAboratory for Visionnary Architecture) (Stuttgart, Abu Dhabi & Sydney) is a lightweight architectural sculpture made of high-tech nylon which has been digitally cut by CNC (Computer Numeric Code) machines thanks to patterns unfold by computer.I would be glad to know that it could bring some more light into the building, but I won't be so sure about that...more pictures on Plataforma Arquitectura

Tomorrow's Thought Today is a quite new information platform about fictious next urbanism and design. It is lead by two English architects, Darryl Chen and Liam Young, who decided to quit the star system's dependency to develop their own vision.Here is their manifest:

TOMORROW'S THOUGHTS TODAY is a London-based think tank exploring the consequences of fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanisms. This site is organized as an open sketchbook of our current themes and design projects an ever-expanding repository of our collective research.TTT REACTS against a torrent of professional conservatism in the urban and regeneration industries and seeks to revive dormant ideas as new sources of inspiration from para-disciplinary fields. Often this leads to reappraisals of dysfunctional milieu. We want to know why pop, pulp and vulgar are so engaging and persistent.TTT CONDEMNS the fashionable cult of 'innovation' that hides a lack of depth of thinking within historical narratives. We are no longer bound by the strictures of linear history. Rather, we are free to revalidate late-modern pasts, current archaisms and retro projections of the future.TTT BELIEVES that our urban environments are best understood as spatial settings for social and political economies and it is within this frame of reference that the most powerful propositions lie.

lundi 22 décembre 2008

Gilles Ebersolt is a French architect, particulary interested in small often inflatable structures created either for landing on an amazonian canopee, living above an abyss or rolling down a mountain (Ebersolt was in fact asked by Jackie Chan to film his ballule in one of his movie).More pictures and videos on official website.

dimanche 21 décembre 2008

Here is Greg Lynn's last book, published this year by Rizzoli International Publications. It is a very dense and beautiful work which takes risks not to appear like unnumerous other architecture books. In fact, instead of presenting each project in order, specific parts of each project are organised by thematics: Structure / Massing / Apertures / Color / Geometries / Families / Medium / Robots / Fictions (this last thematic host Bruce Sterling and James Graham Ballard's texts)It could appear clumsy to break the project's coherency this way - and sometimes it actually is - but as far as I am concerned, I tend to appreciate very much this deconstruction of projects which offer them even more to the reader's judgement.

vendredi 19 décembre 2008

Through the dripping glass is a project entirely scripted on processing (which does not happen so often !) by Chi-Chen Yang for François Roche & Marc Fornes' Columbia studio called Ncertainties. (click on images to read the text)

mercredi 17 décembre 2008

Here you will see the work of a young Slovenian born artist Tobias PUTRIH, that was exhibited at the FIAC 08 (Paris,FR), his work is situated between sculpture and architecture, what I like the most is the small geodesic structure he builds who look very fragile and hardly standing up.Hes's also working a lot with the world of cinema , he had just built an amazing projection room, the "cinéma attitudes"in september 2008 for his last exibition at the Attitudes gallery (Genève,CH).

Camelbackshotgunspongegarden is a project created by the San Francisco based office Anderson Anderson Architecture after New Orleans' catastrophe in order to prevent floods by swallowing - at least in a certain amount - additionnal water.The project is here exhibited in Venice's Biennal 2006 and it may be not so easy to see on the lowest picture but the device is partly within the water.